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Genealogical Society of Monroe County, MI
45th  ANNUAL SPRING SEMINAR
GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY OF MONROE COUNTY, MI
                       SATURDAY May 10, 2025
                               at the Monroe County Community College
             Featuring Adam Oster & Jeff Mason
 
8:00 am – 9:00 am Registration and Welcome (coffee and donuts)
 
9:00 am – 10:00 am    Yearbooks, Alumni Lists, and Other School Related Records
These records can be rich in details about the people in your family tree.  Discover the activities and clubs that ancestors participated in during their school years.  Learn to uncover details about both your family members and the communities they lived in.  Explore the ways of finding these valuable resources both in-print and online.
 
10:00 am – 10:30 am  Break
 
10:30 am – 11:30 am    Michigan County Poor Farms
Long before the advent of modern social welfare, county governments in Michigan maintained poorhouses or poor farms. Explore the early history of these facilities in their attempts to become both self-sustaining entities and refuges for a county’s poor, elderly and destitute.  Discover the lives and stories of those that resided at these poor farms.  Learn about their transition to serving individuals with chronic illnesses and what eventually led to many of them shutting down in the later part of the 20th Century.
 
11:30 am – 1:00 pm  Lunch (the Big Jerrowski food truck will be on-site)
    
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm  Breaking Down Brick Walls & Reviving Dead Ends
This lecture will include lists of records and general pathways and strategies for locating hard to find ancestors.  There is also a case study that utilizes these records and employs the general strategies.  There will be some Q&A time for me to field questions from the audience.
 
2:00 pm – 2:30 pm      Break
 
2:30 pm – 3:30 pm  Death & Taxes - 2 Things You Cannot Afford to Miss - A Genealogical Perspective
This course focuses on records that are normally found at a county courthouse, with heavy emphasis on land records, tax records, and will and estate records.  A comprehensive case study is presented, with some time allowed for questions from the audience.
 
Bring your own lunch or visit the food truck/a local restaurant
 
Cost is $30 if you register before April 26, 2025 
$40 for late registrations
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